6 Metrics Every Course Creator Should Be Tracking

Your first question is probably how often should you be looking at these numbers? Ideally you want to look at these numbers once a week – or at least once a month.

Metric 1) Number of Email Subscribers

The first metric that you should review is the number of email subscribers since your email list is essential to building your course business. Every day you should be doing something to build the list. Use this metric to keep track of what’s working and what’s actually getting you new subscribers.

Metric 2) Email Open Rate

Metric number two is to look at your email open rate and this is from your email newsletter software. It lets you know how many folks are interested in the emails that you’re sending out. Ideally you should have a 20 to 30% open rate – anything higher is fantastic. If it’s lower than that you may need to work on improving your subject lines.

Metric 3) Reach of Your Social Media

The third metric I’d like to see you looking at is the reach of your social media and so this is looking at how many Facebook followers you have, how many Twitter followers you have, how many LinkedIn connections you have, how many Instagram followers you have, etc.

Metric 4) Click Rates

When looking at click rates, we are tracking what links in your emails are clicked on and what social media links are clicked on. An easy way to track this is using a WordPress plugin called “Pretty Links” (if you have your own hosted WordPress site). Pretty links makes it super easy to create links and track whether they have been clicked or not.
Metric 5) Number of Students

The fifth metric I want you to be looking at is the number of students that you have in your courses. Obviously the higher the better and the more revenue you’re making. You’ll want to watch this one at least monthly.
Metric 6) Profit = Revenue – Expenses

The last metric is the Profit that you’re making and this is equal to the revenue or the earnings that you get from your course business minus whatever expenses you have. Ideally our profit is increasing each month, but keep an eye on your expenses. If they grow more quickly than your revenue, you could actually be making less profit – even though you are selling more courses.

Create a Dashboard

You can create a simple dashboard to track these metrics in a spreadsheet, or you can use one of the tools specifically designed for tracking and report on your numbers. Three tools you can review are Dasharoo.com.

Now Take Action

Start tracking today… even if you only pick one of the six to put into a spreadsheet, get going. Remember you can’t improve what you don’t track. Check out Dasheroo.com – you can create one dashboard at no charge.